The Rights of Man and Natural Law

Overview

About a hundred and twenty pages, a wartime essay by Jacques Maritain, written in New York in 1942 while his own France remained occupied, that grounds human rights in the natural law tradition. The first part distinguishes the human person from the individual and argues that society exists for the person and the person is ordered to the common good.

The second part derives the rights of the person, the civic person and the working person from natural law. The book influenced the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on which Maritain worked for UNESCO.

What happens

Distinguishing the person from the individual. Maritain opens by distinguishing the human person from the mere individual, arguing that society exists for the person, a being with genuine spiritual dignity and destiny, rather than the person existing merely as an interchangeable unit serving society’s own separate purposes.

The person ordered to the common good. Maritain argues that the person is ordered to the common good, positioning his natural law theory carefully between purely individualist accounts that treat society as merely instrumental and purely collectivist accounts that treat the person as merely an instrument of the collective.

The rights of the person. The second part opens by deriving the rights of the person directly from natural law, establishing the foundational category of rights that belong to human beings simply by virtue of their nature rather than through any particular government’s specific grant.

The rights of the civic person. Maritain extends his derivation to the rights of the civic person, addressing specifically political rights that follow from the person’s status as a member of an organized political community rather than purely from individual human nature alone.

The rights of the working person. The essay concludes its derivation by addressing the rights of the working person, extending natural law theory into the specific domain of economic and labor relations, a genuinely practical application beyond purely abstract political philosophy.

Influence on the Universal Declaration. The essay’s arguments would go on to directly influence the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on which Maritain worked through his involvement with UNESCO, connecting this specific wartime philosophical essay to the actual postwar international human rights framework.

How to read it

Read the distinction between person and individual as the essay’s genuine philosophical foundation; everything that follows about rights and the common good depends on this initial distinction, which positions human dignity as grounded in something deeper than mere social function or political membership.

Pay close attention to how carefully Maritain positions his natural law theory between individualism and collectivism; the claim that the person is ordered to the common good avoids both treating society as merely instrumental to isolated individuals and treating individuals as merely instrumental to the collective.

Notice how directly the essay’s historical circumstance, written in 1942 while watching totalitarian states violate exactly the rights natural law theory claims are inherent, shapes its argument’s genuine urgency; this is philosophy written with immediate, consequential stakes rather than purely academic reflection.

Consider the essay’s documented practical influence on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as significant evidence of its actual historical importance; this connects a specific wartime philosophical argument directly to the postwar international human rights framework that continues shaping global political discourse today.

Read this essay alongside Maritain’s own True Humanism to see how the same underlying personalist philosophy, developed there as a broader response to the crisis of liberalism, communism and fascism, receives more specifically practical and legal application here in the domain of human rights theory.

Questions it raises

• Does grounding human rights in natural law provide a more secure foundation than purely social contract or purely positive legal theories of rights? Does Maritain’s specific argument successfully establish why these rights should be considered inherent rather than simply granted by political authority?
• How does the distinction between person and individual function as a genuine philosophical safeguard against totalitarian political theory? Does this distinction adequately explain why totalitarian systems specifically fail to respect human dignity, or does it require further development to make this connection fully persuasive?
• What does deriving distinct categories of rights, of the person, the civic person, the working person, accomplish that a single undifferentiated category of human rights could not achieve? Does this specific tripartite structure illuminate genuine distinctions in how different kinds of rights actually function?
• How should a reader weigh this essay’s documented practical influence on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights against its purely philosophical persuasiveness? Does historical influence validate the underlying argument, or do these represent genuinely separate questions worth evaluating independently?
• Given that Maritain wrote this essay specifically during wartime exile from occupied France, how might this circumstance have shaped both the argument’s content and its rhetorical urgency? Does understanding this context change how persuasive or how personally invested the essay’s claims actually feel?
• What does grounding rights specifically in Thomist natural law tradition, rather than more secular Enlightenment social contract theory, suggest about how religious and secular approaches to human rights theory might actually relate? Does Maritain’s specifically religious grounding limit or strengthen the argument’s broader applicability?